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Ralph
•
3mo
added comment inAssignment - Perspective for Drawing Anything
Asked for help
So, i feel like i know some basics of perspective up to three point already and I also know some construction tricks to understand where to place things in a picture. However, I often struggle with certain applications of these basics. Mostly when accuracy or consistency is required. I can draw a box and make it look realistic, in "3D" space, but drawing the exact same box rotated correctly on multiple axis becomes a challenge. I can only rely on things like "it feels like it should converge this much and this edge is now closer to me so it should be a bit taller, right?" If I try to implement this intuition based approach however, i have one cube in the middle of the page and then various rotated rectangular shapes with varying edges and even sizes as a result.
Being abel to do that with organic shapes (e.g. humans in a pose) would be the next step of that.
The same problems apply to drawing extreme foreshortening. I have an idea how things should converge and look 3D when I draw them. I also think I understand how a basic 5 point grid is supposed to work (not completely), but what I do not get is how I can get the relation of everything in the same scene to look consistent. If the hand of an outstretched arm is close to the camera, how long should the arm be and and how tall should the body be in relation to that?
So, "drawing the same thing from different (extreme) angles and having it look consistent"? would be a goal for me. Or maybe just "understanding how the size of the same thing foreshortens differently in various rotations"? (Mainly for drawing comics).
I tried to find some images online that show what i mean. If I can get past these things, by the end of this class, that would be great. And sure, the classic spiral stairs and other tricky problems are interesting as well and maybe all of that is related, but to me at least, that is not the focus.
Luke
•
3mo
Asked for help
I studied Fengwei Cui and Ale Halexxx. I know the hatching leans more towards shading, but I've wanted to learn hatching like this for a long time and finally felt confident enough to tackle it. There were lots of lessons learned and it makes me excited to go back to figure drawing once I'm done this course
Dude, why is this marked as "Asked for help"? I had to go back and forth multiple times to even see which ones were the reference and which one where yours.
@rinivar
•
4mo
Hello, could you please give me some advice how to improve them? I think the main problem is proportions + wrong perspective. I sometimes find it hard to visualize the box behind all the distracting volumes of the muscles and skin. I try to focus on the visible landmarks, make a line where I see them, but then I struggle with connecting it to the other side (which is sometimes hidden behind those other volumes.
numbers by the drawings are refference to the poses from the Gesture Reference Sampler nude.
Putting into words what is off about some of the boxes would probably take quite a big wall of text since it would require explaining perspective again. I do not have the time to do a drawover, so I will try to make it brief. Numer 9-0 and maybe 3.0 look pretty good to me, but almost all other boxes ignore some rules of perspective. This lack of understanding how perspective works and how one of the boxes would have to be drawn in relation to the other, makes it feel like they are not connected properly in many cases.
In general i would argue that you have some trouble with making the lines of your boxes converge "correctly" and understanding "3d" space (or rather the illusion of 3d space on a 2d piece of paper). Practicing this with distorted and twisted boxes is making things needlessly more difficult. In other words: You are focusing on landmarks and muscles before having understood perspective enough. Given that you still struggle with perspective you make focussing on landmakrs and anatomy even more difficult. Most of the boxes are also hardly rotated (mostly front facing with some rotation but no bending of 90° or anything) This further makes me feel like you need to work on understanding boxes in perspective more before tackling body shapes.
Given that understanding boxes in perspective intuitively is pretty essential, I would recommend to try the 250 Box challenge over on https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes . It is pretty boring but it helped me doing boxes intuitively a lot. (read and follow the instructions though, especially the part about checking the convergence of your boxes after every page. If you first draw all the boxes and then check them, you learn a lot less than if you draw five boxes on one piece of paper, check and then implement what you learned on the next page)
some words on particular boxes:
1.0 - the lower edge of the top box aligns with the upper back edge of the lower box. Therefor it looks like it is further back. The boxes would have to overlap to be correct. You have improved that in 1.1.
2.0 - The left and right side of the lower box are visible simultaneously, which would only be the case if the box got wider towards the back. In other words, the edges do not converge properly.
12.0 - The edges of the bottom box moving "away" from the viewer are parallel. No real convergence to one point.
15.9 - The top box has all of the edges going "away" from the viewer are also parallel. No real convergence, just some distortion.
Whelp… turned into a wall of text anyways. I hope it wasn't too harsh and you can get something out of it. Keep it up.
JK
•
4mo
Hello! So I’m back to the beginning of the course from the shapes part to figure out my mistakes with simplifying from observation. I was trying to get the idea of what exactly should be drawn or “how” it should be, that in the moment with the last (third) pear I’ve realised I went to a different direction -__- should it be something closer to the first pear in this project? (In terms of planes)
I believe the idea behind this exercise was simplification. Simplify shapes and shadow. By only using straight lines and four shades of grey + white, you are supposed to leave out a lot of unnecessary detail and focus on shape design. (also it was meant to be a simple shape so beginners could have a little success moment at the beginning of the course i guess)
So yeah, more like the first and second pear. The third one is blending everything already again. Stan explains it pretty well in his own demo of the pear though, so maybe take a look at that as well?
Ralph
•
4mo
Asked for help
I'll hopefully get to the other ones soon. Been drawing on the train, so long straight lines tend to be wonky from the shaking. Apart from that i cannot help but focus on the sloppy proportions. The anvil is completely off, the wheel of the wheelbarrow is wrong, the hammer isn't really symmetrical and so on… Guess I should be glad that I know where to improve, but I'd also like to be happy with a drawing again once in a while…
Ralph
•
10mo
Just wanted to point out that I feel these things were sorely missing in the portrait course. Facial expressions too, although those could be a course of their own. Loomis only gets you so far. Do you ever intend to update the portrait course with newer videos or make a new/advanced one that goes into facial plains, expressions, maybe the asaro head, etc? (Sorry for posting this here. Feels like there is a way better chance that somebody from the team will read it in a newer class)
Ralph
•
11mo
may I ask why you use moving along the y axis but rotating around the X axis as examples in the first minute? I know they are just examples, but given how much confusion exists around perspective and how much I struggled with it myself, wouldn't it be better to first show movement along the three axis to indicate how the foreshortening changes and THEN show that you can also rotate things around any axis? Otherwise that can already start out the video with some confusion on why the "change" on the Y axis is so different from the X axis. Maybe I am overthinking it, but given that it is the very fist example for the subject, maybe that would be helpful? Just my 2 cents. I doubt it will derail someones art career to leave it as it is.
@trrahul
•
11mo
Asked for help
This was hard but fun. Struggled a lot with 6, 8 and 9. I was drawing lines parallel to the 'eyebrow line' and the 'lip line' to find the box edges.
I don't really have much to add. You are not drawing rectangular boxes but rather planes wrapped around the head. This often leads to wedge or pyramid-like shapes. (e.g. image 4, 5 and 7). In other images, you may have figured out how one set of lines through visible landmarks is supposed to look (e.g. image 9) but you made all lines going in the "same" direction pretty much parallel to that rather than actually converging them. It is more of a parallelogram than a box around the head. (same with picture 8). Rather than just moving the lines up and down, try to find some obvious easy to find lines (top of the ear to eyebrow, eyebrow to eyebrow, center of the forehead to middle of the mouth/chin) and then use what you know about perspective and how lines should converge in 3D space to construct the other lines, rather than "finding" them in the image. If that is hard, try drawing a lot of randomly rotated boxes floating in space. Also draw the lines you normally would not see as if the box was made from wires. When you have about 4-6 boxes on the page, elongate the edges and see if "parallel" edges actually converge to one point to check yourself (essentially the drawabox 250 boxes challenge). it is tedious but will give you an intuitive understanding of boxes in 3D space over time. Then you don't have to rely on just the image to find a box but you can rather use what you see in the image to construct the box with what you know about perspective.
In picture 9 you also have the edge of the box that faces the viewer go through the corner of the left eye. Yet the outer edge of the box goes through her hair rather the the outside corner of the other eye. This the box is not centered on the face.
julien Gaumet
•
11mo
Asked for help
Hi everyone !
After few attempts on paper, it felt so difficult I chose trying tracing over pictures first. Even like this it was quite a challenge. I did all the picture this way but posted only a few. As the picture number grew, I felt a little more confident.
Please let me know if it feels right to you.
On most picture, it was really difficult to find convergence between the lines because I was really influenced by parts on the face. When I switched my mind into “cross contour” mode, it helped in my opinion.
Waiting for your opinion on these and I’ll try again on paper without pictures underneath !
Thank you guys for your help !
I'll try to put into words what I see, but I often struggle to explain what I mean in a foreign language, so please bear with me if my thoughts on your work seem tedious or messy.
In general, you seem to have a rough grasp on how perspective should work, However when putting the boxes over a photo or a head, you seem to struggle between following the rules of perspective and what you see in the photo. Also you are using parts of the face as reference for where your lines should go, that would protrude past the box, like the tip of the nose.
What do I mean by that? If the eyebrows represent a part of your box and the forehead represents a part of your box, then the ROOT of the nose or the chin would be on the same plane for the front face of that box. The TIP of the nose however is not on the same plane as the eyebrows, forehead and chin. In your picture number two you start the line in the center of the front face at the forehead, but then you go through the tip of the nose and therefor miss the tip of the chin. You can try that in real life. If you put your pencil on your face in a way that the tip touches your forehead and the other end touches the tip of the nose, you will see that you are holding that you are holding your pencil at an angle that does not follow an imaginary box around your head but rather points in a "diagonal" direction compared to that imaginary box. (I attached an image in a profile view of a head to illustrate what i mean. The blue lines show how a box would roughly wrap around a head and the red line shows how a line going through the tip of the nose deviates from that.)
The other thing that sticks out to me is that once you established a correct line, the other lines that should follow the rules of two or three point perspective ignore the foundation you put down. Again in picture two, the line going from the top right of his fore head (top left from our perspective) to ho the bottom right seems correct to me. That we can see the top of the box indicates, that the person is looking down a bit (which he does), but then the line from the center of the forehead through the nose leans AWAY from the first line. The rules of perspective would dictate, that these lines should converge towards the bottom somewhere. Yours spread apart. Again that is probably because you drew the center line through the tip of the nose and the next line was oriented towards that already wrong center line. So rather than sticking to what you know about perspective, you let what you see in the image deceive you and broke the rules of perspective to follow that second line you put down.
Another smaller thing is, that most boxes seem to ignore the upper portion of the head. In image 18 we clearly see how the box does not include the rounding of the top of the head. Also the Box is skewed because you stick more to how you interpret the image. Try to use some easy to find refrence points (line trhough the eyebrows, line from the middle of the forehead through the middle of the chin, line from the top of the ears to the eyebrows) and then try to use what you know about perspective to construct the box around the ehad, rather than letting what you see in the image confuse you.
This basically keeps on going. In image 19 you correctly drew a line form the top of the ear to the eyebrow. it is angled slightly upwards, therefor indicating that the man is looking slightly up. However the line above that is angled down. This likely happened, because it is very hard to tell what a box around a rounded surface would look like or what direction it should go. The top of our head is pretty spherical so it is hard to find a box around it that matches the rest of the face. That is why you should rely on the points that are easy to tell (in this case top of the ear to the eyebrow) and then use what you know about perspective to understand how the line above should be angled. In this case the line from the ear to the eyebrows is angled upwards. The line above is angled downwards. So much in fact that the top plane suggests the box was angled downwards rather than upwards.
So bottom line:
Try to find lines that are easy where you can tell for sure, in what direction a line would have to go. Then construct the other lines with what you know about converging lines in perspective rather than letting the rest of the image distract you.
